Hi David,

    Your mail comes at the right time! I share your needs for
empirical studies of programmer's usage of the IDE, and I am going to
release an updated version of my
IDE monitoring tool (called "SpyWare" ;-) ) in the next few days.

I think we could join forces and share data. Incidentally, I am going
to Bern at the end of this week to meet some people at SCG... If
you're around we can discuss and compare
our needs. Feel free to reply on or off-list.

    Cheers,
         Romain

On 2/18/07, David Röthlisberger <squeak at c3com.ch> wrote:

> Second, I would also like to do kind of empirical studies in the future
> to somehow validate the effectiveness and efficiency of new approaches
> for an IDE, hence I need subjects performing some experiments in these
> future IDEs and I also need data about how you use your IDE (e.g., how
> you browse source code, how and where you write source code, with which
> tools, etc.). Will you be willing to provide me with these data recorded
> by some non-invasive recordings tools you can simply load in your image
> and which will then save the recorded data to a file which you would
> then send to me? Are you also willing to perform some experiments in new
> IDEs, e.g. trying and playing with them, use them for a project of
> yours, etc.?
> For me it is important to know if I can motivate enough people to do a
> serious empirical study. Without that, I would have a hard time to
> "prove" that a new approach to e.g. navigate source code is indeed
> useful and promising, because this is very much dependent on personal
> feelings and impressions. Only a broader study can hence "prove" the
> general usefulness (or uselessness) of such a new approach or metaphor.
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
> Kind regards,
> David
>
>
>